IPCEI project: Luxembourg, France, Italy and Spain signed the agreement

Several billion Euros are needed in the coming years in the European Union to develop and invest in supercomputers. Commissioner Oettinger and Étienne Schneider, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Economy of Luxembourg, announce this in a recent joint blog post. They elaborate a bit on the announcement of the IPCEI in HPC announced two months ago in Luxembourg. Luxembourg, France, Italy and Spain, in close consultation with other Member States, will provide an HPC and Big Data Enabled Applications implementation roadmap to the European Council and European Commission in September 2016. Both steps are needed in order to improve the European capabilities in the digital area significantly.

We are convinced that Europe has a unique opportunity to act and invest in the development and deployment of High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, Big Data and applications to ensure the competitiveness of its research and its industries” says Commissioner Ottinger.

On a global level, Europe is falling behind in both HPC and Big data. Only one European supercomputing facility ranks among the world top 10 supercomputers, whereas China holds the first position and the U.S. hosts 5 of the top 10 facilities. The risk that we get technologically locked, delayed or deprived of strategic know-how is very real. There is an increasing recognition of the strategic security and economic impact of HPC enabled applications.

Important Project of Common European Interest - IPCEI on HPC and Big Data Enabled Applications (IPCEI-HPC-BDA), together Luxembourg, France, Italy and Spain signed the agreement. This project intends to develop a number of real-time integrative HPC applications towards a “Smart Nation”.

IPCEIs are major projects that make a significant contribution to economic growth, jobs and the competitiveness of the European industry and economy. They can bring together knowledge, expertise, public and private resources and economic players throughout Europe to undertake large-scale, investment-intensive and highly innovative projects.

We welcome and applaud an IPCEI in HPC and strongly believe that it is a powerful vehicle to build a strong European ecosystem, comprising the whole value chain – from hardware to architecture and software development. The project will establish Large Scale Pan-European Pilots that accelerate the deployment of high-performance computing by European industry and Big data enabled applications.

The European Commission will do its part and soon launch a major initiative addressing the deployment in Europe of a world-class data and computing infrastructure: the European Cloud Initiative. This strategy includes the HPC infrastructure layer and foresees a Cloud where data needed for European research can be stored and processed.

CINECA, with INFN, GARR and CNR, is a core partner of the IPCEI project.